Gawa ta qi rami

THIS is a slightly re-jigged version of a piece I wrote exactly four days to the 2015 presidential election (date). It was on the fate of two people. A tenacious challenger, Buhari and a timorous incumbent Jonathan. Buhari’s health had been made central to the campaigns of the PDP. No thanks to the metaphysics of Femi Fani Kayode and Ayo Fayose. Buhari was so allegedly terminally ill, his traducers said he would not make it to election day. But he did. Because it was now four days to election. And it was the reason I titled that earlier piece ‘BUHARI: FOUR DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON’. Yet four days was more than time enough in the realm of metaphysics to decide matters of life and death. Virtually three years after Buhari’s health is still the issue. He was to die before the election, he didn’t. he was to die before swearing in, he did not. Twice or so after coming to office, he was hastily ‘killed’ by his traducers who could not just wait like the patient vulture.

It is auspicious now that you should read that piece under the title GAWA TA QI RAMI (which is Hausa for ‘The corpse that defies internment’)

Buhari: Four days to Armageddon

The deed is done

In burst of physical size he is nothing near any blossoming shrub of the desert let alone a towering tree in our evergreen political ecosystem. But in courage and constancy; in honesty and humility and in the observance of duty and strict discipline, General Muhammadu Buhari easily outsizes even the towering baobab tree of the dry Savannahs. In fact, baring his apparent height, Buhari’s lanky, languid Fulani frame seems to mock at the very essence of what an intimidating physical human stature should be. His height alone should have been intimidating enough, but for these three natures: first his lean body, second, a comportment that seems to fight the natural overbearingness of his great persona, and thirdly a demeanor he has which is always lit with the humblest of smiles. These three may have combined to create in Buhari a uniquely self-effacing nature which seldom let even his towering height leap above the chosen measure of his modesty.

And for resilience the Daura-born Presidential candidate of the APC evokes the attributes even of a far smaller deciduous shrub, namely the ‘moringa plant’ –one of science’s recent multi-healing discoveries and perhaps pharmacology’s candidate-elixir for the many sicknesses of man. Moringa is a stem plant that has a unique capacity to survive both the assail of harsh, dry weather and the self-serving daily plucking of herbs-dependent man. Jonathan and PDP have made the political Buhari a veritable ‘moringa plant’ of the Hausa man’s praise especially when, in gratitude to the many uses of this rare botanical gift of the Savannahs, the Hausas often sing: ‘zogalegandi na mai gari, ana saranka kana tsaye’; meaning: ‘amazing moringa, the King’s delight, the more that you are defoliated, the further you bloom’.

Or better still, General Buhari has proved himself an even tougher botanical weed, namely the ‘chamomile’, -a stubborn carpet grass- which “the more it is trodden upon” Shakespeare wrote, “the faster it grows”. Thrice they had ridden roughshod over him; thrice he had risen again –proving yet the Shakespearean adage that “wise men do not sit to bewail their losses but rather cheerfully rise to redress their harm”.

The Hausas say that ‘dan hakin da ka raina, shi zai tsone ma ido’: meaning: ‘the prickly little reed that is disdained may soon become the troubling speck in the eye of the disdainer.’ And the Yorubas have a similar one; which they put in the form of a riddle requiring an answer. Literally it begins with an allegorical address to a ‘crookedly-hanging object’: Igi gangaran ma gunmi loju: meaning ‘thou crookedly-hanging object, hurt not mine eye’! And then the one who solves the riddle answers: ‘okere latinwo’, meaning ‘it behooves the passer-by wary in order to avoid being in harm’s way’. But either for the fun of it or may be for want of dialectical depth, the urban, especially Lagos Yorubas are famed instead for answering the riddle with the Yorubanised English: ‘wa dodge-ye.’ Meaning ‘you have to dodge it’!

APC’s Buhari, to my mind, is now ‘the prickly little reed’ in the Hausa adage which the PDP, to its own eternal peril, has arrogantly disdained. Buhari has thus ‘become the troubling speck in the watery eye’ of an un-heeding incumbency. In fact, Buhari has become the ‘Igi gangaran’ or the ‘crookedly-hanging object’ in the Yoruba riddle which the PDP, over the years, has made a very poor job of ‘dodging’.

Pride goeth before the fall

They had laughed at his losses and they bemoaned his gains. They scorned his feats and they derided his foibles. And his frailties they raised to the height of unspeakable sin. They dug his excellent past and they incitingly perverted it! They laced his military antecedent with an ill foreboding brush of divisive falsehood. They are so cruel they celebrated his most harrowing bereavements -mocking at the spirit of his late sickle-celled anemic daughter and carving lurid conjectures on the grave of his late divorced spouse. These people are ravenous hyenas of our political barren playing field. All is flesh and bones that come to their greedy jaws. They said that at 72 he was too old to be President; and you wonder ‘what happens to the democratic right of the people to decide whether to be properly governed by an octogenarian or to be misgoverned by the extravagant energies of decadent youth?’

Then they said that he was sick. And you wonder: ‘who is not sick aside he that is not yet born’? And who by the way is healthy? “Everyone who is born” Susan Sontag said “holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the ‘well’ and in the kingdom of the ‘sick’”. But they insisted that he was not just sick, he was dead-sick; grave-sick. That he was ‘cancerous’. And for that they cooked up a medical report. He couldn’t last the campaigns they said; he hadn’t the strength to withstand such rigour. And since he was a dead man walking -food soon, for the maggots- why should Nigerians waste their votes on such a candidate?

And if you thought that the determination of ‘soon’ was the prerogative only of the gods, then you are ignorant of the demi-god powers of the anointed auxiliaries of God themselves -namely Fayose and Fani Kayode. Since these two enjoy the privy confidence of God, they should know how ‘soon’ Buhari would vacate the earth. But it is now four days to election, and Buhari is not only alive, he is in fact kicking! Yet four days is admittedly plenty time for the Cherubims and Seraphims of PDP to work out matters of life and death. By the way they could simply tap Buhari on the shoulders and politely make a James Hadley Chase request: ‘DO US A FAVOUR SIR, DROP DEAD!’

And why not!? Buhari might just oblige. He is brain dead, remember? And do not forget also they have said that he is in the race not so that he be President, but so that he would make his ‘godfather’, Tinubu President. They said that when he wins he would ask his Vice Osinbajo to resign; and he will then nominate Tinubu as Vice President; and like the salmon fish in its circle of self-immolation, Buhari will then go lie in his death-bed, do a few kicks of death, gasp a little for breath, and then die. Then Tinubu the Don will now ascend the throne and be President.

And so if Buhari can be a co-conspirator in a tragi-comic political melodrama in which he is to die to pave the way for another, Buhari can as well oblige a request from any of the PDP goons to do them a favour and ‘DROP DEAD!’

By the way, they also said that he was un-certificated; that he never went to school; not any! Neither primary nor secondary school; and that all the courses and trainings he underwent from his enlistment into the Nigerian Army up to becoming a General weren’t worth even a kindergarten experience. He was thus not qualified to contest the Presidential election. As a matter of fact, since in the realm of law you cannot put something on nothing, the absence of foundation certificates in Buhari’s academic claim, meant that his entire life-time military career was null and void. So now you shouldn’t even call him a ‘General’! He is simply ‘Mallam’ Muhammadu Buhari. And thus having been a serial ‘impostor’ who made it to the peak of the Nigerian Army without as little as a Primary school certificate, he should be arrested, tried and jailed! He should then be made to cough out every nickel he took in his entire ‘fake’ life-time military career.

There is no trick in the books they have not tried; there is no red herring they have not thrown; all to no avail. They said he was a Muslim fundamentalist. As if being a fundamentalist of a creed is a vice and not a virtue. And yet they would not admit –the hypocrites that they are- that Jonathan, the ‘believer President’ is more than a fundamentalist. He is an extremist. This is a President who has turned the pulpit into a trench of war; he used the altar as a platform for foul and uncleaneth language. Jonathan has used men of God and has used the holy estates of the divine to traffic arms and to launder wealth of ill-repute. He has paid money to buy incense and to purchase the anointing of God in his political affairs; he has given to Caesar what is God’s and he has taken the filth of Caesar to the altar of the Almighty. Yet in Jonathan’s hypocritical flaunt of religion to meet a political end, these bigoted supporters of PDP claimed they saw ‘virtue’; but in Buhari’s sincere moderation of his personal life in accordance with his faith, they said they saw ‘vice’.

Re- On Buhari: ‘Sickness as constitutional Offence’

+2347064869167:- “Thank you for your article on Buhari’s sickness. But I have one question for you: will you maintain the same view if Buhari is ‘John’ from Imo State? You mentioned Reagan, was his sickness made secret I expect that writers like you should be able to call a spade a spade”.

Online:- “Pointedly, and with all his infirmities, Ronald Reagan who was almost nicked by the ‘Car Wash’ man Hinckley in his first year as President, not only won re-election but went on to become ( and this depends on which side of the political divide you stand) one of the most popular American Presidents since the Union was founded”

Re- ‘A re-make, not an amendment’

+234806287535:- “Your piece is wonderful. We need a new Constitution to move Nigeria forward instead of amending an old Constitution. Immunity for NASS rejected”. –Chika Nnorom.

Online: “We have seen how and what the calamitous NASS has sown. Surely, the supposed constitutional amendment or re-make is not in over all, collective aspirations of ‘the people’ the attempt to arrogate so much power to NASS is glaring. Indeed this brilliant piece says it all.” –Musa Sulaiman

Postscript

But it is four days to Armageddon today. On that day the battle between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ will be waged; the battle between a thieving Jonathan and an incorruptible Buhari; between an enslaving PDP and a liberating APC; between ethno-religious bigots and true men of God; between the true man of God Father Mbaka and the false prophet Oritsejiafor; between true patriots and enemies of the fatherland.